The Case Against Doomsday Clock: Part Four: The Way Forward

“I am not a saint, unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying.” – Nelson Mandela

So where do we go from here?

The history is clear, the ethics are abominable, and there are no good excuses for DC Comics’ actions. Yet even if everyone can agree that what has come so far is crappy, that still leaves open the question of what should be done next. That is most likely the most difficult part of this entire controversy. It is not the admittance that sins have been committed, but the decision on how we should act given that knowledge.

It is a much more difficult question to tackle.

There Is No Right Answer

This may seem like a cop out, but it’s truly not. Ethical questions are difficult even in imagined scenarios. In real life they become even more thorny. Providing a one-size-fits-all solution ignores the many different perspectives someone might have to this situation. How an employee of DC Comics, a pop culture journalist, and a fan of superhero stories will respond will be entirely different.

Some people may quietly refuse to read Doomsday Clock, while others might vocally denounce it and encourage others to do the same. Some may refuse to accept paid work for it, while others may minimize their contact without risking their jobs. Many will do nothing at all. There is no one right answer here, and there’s no arbiter of comics ethics in the position to tell any one person how they must behave.

That doesn’t make all responses right either. Pitching a story to include Doctor Manhattan in a DC Comics crossovernext year is an inappropriate response to the facts. So is the publication of a longform piece decrying Alan Moore as a crank who doesn’t deserve to control anything he has created. These examples would seem like straw men if they weren’t already very realresponses.

We Can Agree On The Facts

The double-edged sword of Watchmen’s success for DC Comics is that its history is well-documented. It’s easy to research what actually happened every year from the story’s conception in 1985 forward. Countless interviews, articles, and wiki pages have been dedicated to the subject. That makes it relatively easy to agree on the facts.

David Brothers provided a quick summation of the facts and history leading to Before Watchmen in 12 points that you can find here. It’s a much more concise version of the first part of this essay and worth reviewing because this is very much what happened in a two minute summary. If we can’t agree on that, then we can’t agree on a shared reality.

But I think we can agree on the facts of this situation because they’re well sourced and have been covered extensively on comics websites. DC Comics’ treatment of Moore and Gibbons is not up for debate; that’s the common ground from which we can move forward.

Let’s Make The Next Step Better

We may not be able to agree on what the right thing to do regarding Watchmen is, but if we can agree on the facts then there’s the possibility of improvement.

Nothing will stop Doomsday Clock from being published, and it’s unlikely DC Comics will stop screwing Alan Moore or Dave Gibbons in the foreseeable future. That doesn’t change how we address the issue or the future of comics.

We can all look at Doomsday Clock and admit that it is the result of three decades of bad behavior. We can acknowledge this publicly without making excuses for that bad behavior. Simply put, we can speak the truth. And when someone is unaware or unfamiliar with that truth we can point to the known history that makes it clear.

By doing so, we can clarify what behavior is acceptable and what is unacceptable. We can recognize that ethics matters, the same in comics as it does everywhere else. We can reaffirm what we are willing to tolerate and what is intolerable. We can agree upon a set of facts that allow us to discuss what doing the right thing means. Even if this does not make what happened with Watchmen any better, it might prevent it from happening to others. The past is still with us; the mistreatments of Moore, Gibbons, Kirby, Finger, Siegel, Shuster, and hundreds of others are posted across new comics each week. The future is ours to define though.

We live in an increasingly strange world. Real news is decried as fake and attention to ethical concerns is put down as unrealistic. Worrying over the disastrous treatment of two creators in superhero comics might seem small as we worry about a very real Doomsday Clock ticking ever closer to midnight, but this example has never been more pertinent.

Even if you decry the anger and frustrations of Moore as a storm in a teacup, that storm is a reflection of the much larger battle being waged in politics, business, and the environment right now. Our response to the mistreatment of two creators by DC Comics helps to inform our response to the mistreatment of an entire island of American citizens or thousands of small communities suffering in an opioid epidemic. At the center of all of these issues lies the same central question: What is the right thing?

Answering that question is difficult even in this small piece of comics history, but that does not make it impossible here or in far more serious circumstances. We possess the means to understand and reason in order to find solutions or, at the very least, some common ground.

We can look at the history and the facts of a situation.

We can argue based upon those facts for what is right and what is wrong.

We can assess other’s arguments to better understand what is right.

And we can arrive at a conclusion.

Let’s not dismiss Doomsday Clock as a minor ethical debacle. Dismissing one wrong as too small allows us to do the same for ever mounting, ever greater wrongs. Instead let’s begin to acknowledge real facts and discuss what the right thing to do is. We can start right here in comics and move forward to solving the great issues of our day.

Watchmen might provide a bleak view of the future, but we can provide a better answer.

About The Author

Chase is a mild-mannered finance guy by day and a raving comics fan by night. He has been reading comics for more than half of his life. After graduating from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln with degrees in Economics and English, he has continued to research comics while writing articles and reviews online. His favorite superhero is Superman and he'll accept no other answers. Don't ask about his favorite comic unless you're ready to spend a day discussing dozens of different titles.

13 Responses

and correct me if I’m wrong. The contract for the Watchmen, Moore & Gibbons would get ownership of the property if the comic went out of print for a year. It proved very successful and that seems to have never happened?

So they got paid for their work. They get royalties (I assume, if they accept them or not isn’t really an issue) so they continue to get paid. So, the deal they made wasn’t great? Could they have done something different, like, get ownership after X years, that sort of thing? I know you mention DC should have been better and whatnot, but I assume they love money.

The article is well written, DC acts like any publisher, it would seem. Not just Marvel/DC, but like any creator who creates an IP, has work for hire but retains the rights, say like Todd Mcfarlane.

The creators from the early days seemed to get a crappy deal, no argument there. Publishers act with no good intentions, that seems to have never changed, no matter who the owner of the IP is.

many creators these days seem to make a name for themselves at big publishers then find success on their own. That’s a positive thing. In my line of work, if I or a co-worker creates a piece of software for our company, they own the rights, everything. I could go independent but that might be harder so I choose the company I work for and what they offer. So don’t think I’m being unsympathetic, just looking at it from another point of view

Shane, I think you make a strong point here, and it’s one I agree with (and from which I tend to disagree with my colleagues here at CB).

The fact is, Moore and Gibbons made what they felt was a great deal at the time for Watchmen. Most of the articles and interviews written at the time discuss how the two of them received unprecedented co-ownership of these properties and the ability to share in royalties for them. It was presented as a way that DC stood out from Marvel, and the offered pretty much the same deal to people like Robert Loren Fleming and Trevor Von Eeden (for Thriller) and Frank Miller for Ronin). All of the creators went into their deals seeing them as real steps forward for the industry. Contemporaneously to the Watchmen deal, Moore was dealing with Eclipse Comics and their pretty terrible handling of Miracleman. I believe Moore made what he felt at the time was the best combination of safety (big, secure publisher able to pay good page rates) and creators rights.

DC is continuing to pay royalties on this work. I spoke to Dave Gibbons at SDCC 2015 and he seemed happy about the money he was receiving. DC has followed the letter of the contract. They simply refuse to allow the contract to be renegotiated to remove an IP that is available to them.

There’s more to life than money, obviously. There’s integrity, and owning your art and controlling your own destiny. It sucks that DC published Before Watchmen and it sucks that they’re publishing Doomsday Clock. But in the long list of creators who’ve been screwed – from Siegel and Shuster to Bill Finger to Jack Kirby to Len Wein (for Swamp Thing and Wolverine) to so many others, this is such a petty injustice to me. When I think of Dave Cockrum, near destitution in a New York VA hospital while the first X-Men movie minted millions of dollars, that’s a hell of a worse injustice.

Moore and Gibbons were perfectly happy to sign the contract… surely it’s more unethical for them to want to renege on that deal and get a better offer?

It’s as if they want to have their cake and eat it: if the book was a mild seller, then today they’d have ownership of the characters and very few people would care about or remember Watchmen. But the thing blew up and now they want a larger slice of the pie? I sympathise to an extent, but they signed on the dotted line and so have to face the repercussions.

Furthermore, to link the Watchmen hullabaloo to wider “this is just one example of how the world is turning to s—t” global problems seems to be overhyping and overinflating this little Watchmen dispute into something more important than it actually is. As you said yourself in your articles, comics these days are a niche medium, and this is a stom in a teacup compared to other problems the world faces.

Conflating the troubled history of a comic book with, say, climate change, Brexit, or North Korea is, I think, slightly demeaning to the real issues that people are facing. You’re trivialising real world problems by comparing them to a contract dispute over a comic? Seems a bit of a stretch.

This long series of articles, I’m sorry to say, was one big example of “whataboutism.” Instead of worrying about some real world issue like North Korea or climate change (which you mention!), hey, what about that bad deal Alan Moore got thirty years ago? It’s one man who wasn’t even really cheated by any fair measure; is worrying about that worth this level of thought and discourse?

I know exactly what it is, I’m pointing it out because the article is bringing it up, and this series is the one that misses the definition. It’s answering a question nobody is asking and creating outrage where there is none.

I have read the 4 articles in one go.
The writer poses an interesting question.
But…

In the article he said that Gibbons and Moore offered the conditions for the renegotiated deal.

quote: “The characters, world, and story of Watchmen were all unique ideas that the collaborators recognized as originating with them, so they petitioned for a reversion clause within their contract. In essence, that clause stated that once Watchmen went out of print for more than one year, its ownership would revert from DC Comics, the publisher, to Moore and Gibbons, the creators.”

Watchmen was such a success that the requested condition never happened.

Further on you provide a solution to this issue, that is quite normal in American business (capitalism).

quote: “The longview of history provides plenty of examples of how corporations behaved legally and unethically. It also provides plenty of examples of how that behavior was changed through legislation, public pressure, and the actions of internal employees. We need look no further than the Fair
Standards Labor Act (FSLA) that removed the legal use of child labor as young as 8 years of age following public outcry. Ultimately, the law is not a clear indicator of what is right and wrong, and is therefore beside the point.”

First off: The law cannot be beside the point. It can be wrong. You can go through a process to change it. But it is the law, and IS the point. Any judge will evaluate your claims against the law.

You cannot cherry pick your laws. They are the rules that order our society.

Second: The creators (or specifically Moore) had 30 years to change the behavior of DC/the comics industry at large through legislation, public pressure, and the actions of internal employees.

In your summary in part I see no indication that this was done.
Moore walked away. Twice.
That is his choice, but will not change the contract he willingly signed.

Should creators have (copy)rights. Yes. Should their heirs (or a faceless company or estate). Imho: No.
But that is a different discussion (to use your words).
The current reality is that the (copy)rights resides with DC Comics. They can do with it what they want.
If Moore want’s his rights, He should have taken them to court. He might still be able to.

Or he should have negotiated a different deal (30 year ago). If only we could predict the future. If only…

Respectfully, I would say that while you do an excellent job of laying out the case for just how poorly Moore & Gibbons were treated by DC, you don’t even have to point to moral/ethical concerns for avoiding Doomsday Clock.

Its existence is another symptom of the pervasive *creative failure* at DC (and in modern superhero comics generally). They are desperately grasping at old properties & successes, cashing in on nostalgia. Before Watchmen was bad enough, but it was at least a limited thing off on its own. Actually bringing the Watchmen world into the “mainstream” DC universe is even more pathetic. This is children dressing up in their dads’ clothes.

Johns is the worst offender at this; he’s practically a one-man cottage industry in scraping through every bit of old Alan Moore material, then blowing it up to fantastic proportions while failing to appreciate what made it special in the first place. His take on “Qull of the Five Inversions” is perfectly emblematic of this: rather than being a strange & evocative name, he made it mean that Qull is a member of a terrorist group of which there are five members. Johns is a guy who reads HP Lovecraft and wonders how many hit points Cthulhu has.

Sorry for the rant. Anyway, I suppose the artistic case for avoiding this is a separate issue from the ethical one, and I hate to be the guy who says “you should have written about this subject instead of that one,” so I’ll say it’s still a great job.

Also of note: at least two commenters on this page have responded with some variation of the “well, Moore & Gibbons signed the contract, didn’t they? Bad move on their part, but they knew what they were getting into!!!” response. Which completely ignores how Chase addressed this very objection in the first post.

This article is excellent. I was at Eclipse when they got Miracleman, so I got to meet Alan and have had a number of conversations with him. I also worked with his one time collaborator David Lloyd on our book Espers. This article is well researched and on point.

Alan is the most fiercely principled and obstinate person but he is far from crazy. He sticks by his guns and does not waver. The ABC thing was a rare instance of him going against his anti DC position because he wanted to protect the jobs of people he worked with. It’s very honorable. A lot of pros would have not done that.

This industry has not recovered from the crash in the 90s because of bad deals and the editors rewarding work on the worst hacks because they happened to be on the ‘in’ list. It’s very high school. This business refuses to grow up or get a clue which is why its still in a rut.

In response to the idea that DC acted unethically by never allowing the reversion clause to be triggered by keeping WATCHMEN in print since its original publication (a point I do not agree with), my question is this:

At what point should DC have opted to let the book go out of print?

DC kept the title in print because it continued to sell well. Period. It had not been profitable, they would have let it go out of print, and potentially eventually revert to Moore and Gibbons. DC and Moore/Gibbons signed the contract based on the then-current conditions of the comic book market. The fact that WATCHMEN was the exception it was (and is) was not foreseeable at the time. Part one of this article even notes that “the idea of a comic remaining in print for five years, let alone thirty, was simply unheard of in 1986.”

So again, when WATCHMEN defied expectations and continued to sell well year after year, at what point did it become “unethical” to keep the book in print?

If Moore/Gibbons truly wanted DC’s ownership of WATCHMEN to expire at some point, they could have asked for an additional condition in the reversion clause that caused the rights to revert after a set amount of time or after the book was out of print for a year (they may have tried to do so, but I’ve never heard anything that suggests that’s the case).

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